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Beijing's Turnabout Is Seen as a Maneuver to Mollify the U.S.

While the two Chinese citizens with permanent residency in the United States who were convicted this week of spying won medical parole, a third person jailed in the case, Qu Wei, remains in a Beijing jail cell.

Mr. Qu, a Chinese citizen, was sentenced on Tuesday to 13 years in prison in the spying case, charged with providing photocopies of speeches and magazine articles deemed state secrets to Gao Zhan, the American-based scholar who was reunited with her family in the United States today. Few people expect that the appeal he is reportedly preparing will win him his freedom.

Mr. Qu's fate, shared by more than a dozen people in similar trouble in China, is a stark reminder that despite the occasional high-profile successes of American diplomacy in winning freedom for people incarcerated in China for political crimes, most cases fall by the wayside.

Some people charge that the Chinese government adeptly manipulates American concerns for individual rights by releasing people like Ms. Gao ahead of important meetings with American officials, creating a subtle undercurrent of indebtedness on the part of the Americans that can color bilateral talks. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the most senior Bush administration official to visit Beijing, arrives on Saturday.

''It may have the effect of making Powell feel grateful and then perhaps not being as firm on underlying issues,'' said Perry Link, a China specialist at Princeton University. He said he ''cringed'' when he read that Mr. Powell is upbeat about American-Chinese relations now that the cases of Ms. Gao and the man sentenced with her to 10 years in prison, Qin Guangguang, have been resolved.

''The bottom of a huge iceberg still lurks there, and will still be there even if a few more of those people arrested are released,'' Mr. Link said.

China has often released well-known political dissidents from jail shortly before meetings with American officials. And the timing of the trials of Ms. Gao and Mr. Qin suggests that more was at work in moving their cases along than just the wheels of justice.

Although she was detained in February, Ms. Gao was not indicted until three days after the International Olympic Committee decided to grant Beijing its wish to act as host to the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. While it is not clear when Mr. Qin was indicted, he had been held since December. Their trials were held just the day before Secretary Powell met China's foreign minister, Tang Jiaxuan, in Hanoi on Wednesday.

The events obliged Secretary Powell to press Mr. Tang for Ms. Gao's and Mr. Qin's release and focused the American diplomatic machinery on achieving that goal. The United States Embassy here said earlier this week that the government was working ''at all levels'' to secure their freedom.

By releasing Ms. Gao and Mr. Qin, China may have won something of a reprieve on human rights, according to some China watchers. While Secretary Powell suggested in comments earlier this week from Tokyo that the United States was not going to fall for such a strategy, he may find that he has to direct his energies elsewhere in order to conduct successful negotiations here.

So as the headlines shift to other items on Secretary Powell's agenda, including cross-strait tensions with Taiwan and the United States' plans for missile defense -- which Beijing opposes -- other cases of people jailed in China for political crimes or people seeking American help in securing medical paroles from Chinese prisons risk slipping back down the diplomatic ranks to a level where movement is excruciatingly slow.

Perhaps the most pressing case is that of Liu Yaping, 48, a Chinese citizen with United States residency who has been detained since March 8 in Hohhot, capital of the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. Mr. Liu, who was seized by the local police over a murky business dispute, has an aneurysm that is leaking blood into his brain, according to his lawyers. They have been permitted to visit him only twice and not at all since May. Appeals by the United States government for his release have so far gone unanswered.

''This case now becomes the one of highest priority for the U.S. because of his dire medical condition,'' said Jerome Cohen, the New York-based lawyer who is handling Mr. Liu's case in the United States. ''He could die any day and it would be the closest thing to intentional homicide that Chinese jailers could perpetrate.''

Next on the list is Wu Jianming, a naturalized American based in New York who was detained on April 8 in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen and is being investigated for alleged espionage on behalf of Taiwan. The Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy has said that Mr. Wu, 46, a former journalist who once taught at the Communist Party school, may be suspected of gathering documents related to the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters that were published in the West last January as ''The Tiananmen Papers.''

Among those already convicted who have asked the United States government for help in securing medical parole is an American from Colorado named Garry Ohmert, who has served nearly 10 years of a 15-year sentence in Shanghai prisons for possession of marijuana.

Mr. Ohmert, 54, recently contracted hepatitis C, a particularly deadly strain of the liver disease, from unsterilized needles while he was being treated at a prison hospital for a gallbladder attack, according to his sister.

The wives of two Chinese dissidents jailed for setting up the now banned China Democracy Party are also seeking international help in getting medical paroles for their husbands.

He Xintong told the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy today that she had visited her husband, Xu Wenli, earlier in the day and found him in deteriorating health. Mr. Xu, 59, jailed for 13 years in 1998 for setting up the democratic party, is suffering from hepatitis and chronic back pain and has lost most of his teeth while in prison, making it nearly impossible for him to eat, his wife said.

Hu Jiangxia, the wife of Wang Youcai, who was sentenced in 1998 to 11 years in prison for his role in founding the party, said he was seeking medical parole for a condition that he feared might be tuberculosis.

Mr. Qin, the United States resident who was granted medical parole today, is expected to leave China for the United States next week. Fearing that he will never be able to see his mother again once he leaves China this time, Mr. Qin has gone to visit her in rural Sichuan Province, according to the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy. His wife, Feng Li, had reportedly suffered heart trouble after learning of his sentence and had been sent to a hospital in Beijing this morning before learning of his parole.

Mr. Qin, 46, an expert on China's minority cultures and himself a member of the Zhuang minority, has worked in Beijing since 1994 for American United Medical (Pharmacy) Industrial Group. The company could not immediately be reached for comment.

Mr. Qu, the Chinese citizen jailed in Ms. Gao's case, is a former instructor at the Air Force Command Institute in China and more recently was deputy director of the propaganda department at the All China Taiwanese Association, an organization of Taiwanese living in the mainland. His wife is a judge with the national Supreme People's Court. She could not be reached for comment tonight and previously has refused to answer questions when contacted by the Hong Kong-based rights group.